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After many years of being taunted in the bitter playground wars of the 1980s, Sinclair ZX Spectrum fans gladly held their own with releases such as Don Priestley's stunning Trap Door, Ocean's ace conversions of Ghouls 'N Ghosts and Rainbow Islands. And who can forget that the old Speccy had probably the best version of R-Type on any 8-bit micro? Not me, as I was reminded many times then and since. Anyway, one of the main arguments against the Speccy was its poor colour handling, which was so obvious in too many games. But it could do hi-resolution graphics, of course, and that was the trade-off to keep the machine affordable for the average British family - well, this and the original beeper, keyboard and so forth.

Some 27 years on and the technologies' ULA (Universal Logic Array) - which basically handled its pixelated display, colour attributes and beeper - is currently being reverse engineered by Chris Smith. In this process (which is not yet finished), new colour-handling facilities have been created allowing a palette of up to 256 colours on a screen at the standard resolution of 256 x 192. Although it's only been implemented in emulation, the plan is for a new ULA replacement for the 48K machines (with a 128K version possible), which easily allows even a BASIC programmer access to 64 colours, and with some machine code trickery to display at all 256. What's important about this development is that it doesn't fundamentally change the rubber-keyed 8-bit micro; it only adds more colours. So you're not turning it into something else, as you still have colour attribute clash to contend with, but a more eye-pleasing palette to choose from.

There are already two games that support this mode, being a small demo by Jonathan Cauldwell called Egghead Plus, which is a simple explorer-type platform game, and Subacuatic by The Mojon Twins, the information for which is available at the link below.

More information is available from sites.google.com/site/ulaplus and scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/ZX_Spectrum_64_Colour_Mode, and until the hardware is available to buy, the relevant emulator is being discussed in the the World Of Spectrum forums at tinyurl.com/SpeccySpin. The multi-platform FUSE [emulator] apparently also supports the new colour mode, and that can be downloaded at fuse-emulator.sourceforge.net.

Once you have the emulator, you may want to see the future of the Speccy and download the games I spoke about earlier. Egghead Plus can be had from tinyurl.com/EggHeadPlus, while Subacuatic is at tinyurl.com/subacuatic.

Cronosoft is now back on track with yet more games for the old Speccy and, unexpectedly, two for the Commodore 64. Starting with the latter format, Cronosoft's latest game for the C64 is the superb platform adventure outing Joe Gunn, by Georg Rottensteiner. Assuming the role of the all-action archaeologist Joseph J Gunn, you find an unknown pyramid in Egypt. Suspecting it to be the lost tomb of the Crocodile King, you head in to explore, and thus opens up one of the best C64 games of the past decade, and will definitely be worth the purchase. Second, which is in its final testing, is Zoo Mania, based on Nintendo's Zoo Keeper available for the DS. The idea is to sort the animals into lines of three or more, which will take those out of the play area, making space for more to drop onto the screen.

Going back to the Speccy again, Cronosoft have the 2D scrolling platform-cum-hangman simulator Rally Bug. The task is to drive a Beetle-styled car across a Marioland-alike world to collect as many alphabet tokens as possible. You can then use these to guess the word at the end of each level, so it's important to get as many as possible. This is ready for release, and should be listed online by the time you're reading this.

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Next out of the hat will be Bob Smith's superb 3D isometric puzzle game WHB. Controlling a stack of cubes, you must tumble and roll it around each level to the stated exit in as few moves as possible. All of these games mentioned will cost no more than £4.99 each, and all will be available on cassette tape. For the latest, head over to Cronosoft's web site.